Saturday, July 15, 2017

The information is real and we're losing it

“After every mass shooting, dozens of them, there would be these
strange clusters of activity,” Starbird says. “It was so fringe we kind
of laughed at it.

“That was a terrible mistake. We should have been studying it.”

Starbird is in the field of “crisis informatics,” or how information
flows after a disaster. She got into it to see how social media might be
used for the public good, such as to aid emergency responders.Instead she’s gone down a dark
rabbit hole, one that wends through the back warrens of the web and all
the way up to the White House.